I’m in a big pinch right now. My computer (32-bit Vista Home Premium sp2) refuses to boot up (it keeps crashing with an error code 0x7b). I don’t care about the computer right now but I need to backup the data inside it. How do we transfer the data from a computer into an external drive when Windows doesn’t even boot up?

How to recover from a crashed system and safely carry out all the important data from a crashed computer? If your PC just won’t boot, or you can’t get into it because it is overrun with viruses, you can use a Windows PE boot CD as a quick way to get access to your files and copy them to another PC, or external drive. The process is simple enough.

How to Recover Data from Unbootable System:

1. To get data back from any crashed and unbootable system, we need a bootable CD to access all the available partitions on the system. Click the following link to create a Windows PE bootdisk on any accessible computer.

How to Create a Bootable Windows PE CD or USB Flash Drive

2. Set your crashed or unbootable computer to boot from CD by going to the Computer BIOS.
3. Once the computer boots off the CD,  it will load the operating system inside the CD. After logging into Windows PE system, you’ll be able to see all the data and files on the hard drive of your crashed or unbootable computer.
4. Attach an USB or any external storage drive to the system and you can copy and backup all your important files to it.

Personally, I have used this CD on numerous occasions and in most cases, I successfully recovered my files like my Mp3 collections, software and documents files. With a non-booting system, our primary aim is to recover all the data first before trying out any solution since a wrong solution can wipe out all the available data from the hard drive.